Alice Ghostley Dies at 81

anytimepally

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Tony Award winning actress Alice Ghostley, most famous for roles on Bewitched and Designing Women died Friday after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes. She was 81.

She earned a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actress in a Play for her various characterizations in The Beauty Part in 1963, & won the award in 1965 for Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. She had roles in the films To Kill a Mockingbird, The Graduate, and Grease.

In Television, she was best known as Esmeralda on Bewitched and Bernice Clifton on Designing Women, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She also guest-starred on many shows from the 60s through the 80s. She was on nearly every sitcom in the 70s and 80s.. she was one of those actresses I'd see in something and say.. "I know her from somewhere," because I'd seen her in a hundred other things.

I've always had an affinity for character actors, and she was one of the best.. my favorite role she ever played was the role of Elinor Callender in the Tales from the Darkside epsiode "Anniversary Dinner"... there was not a creepier, more disturbing character on TV in 1985 than the woman she played in that episode.

Though she hadn't acted since 2004, this is still a huge loss. She was always a delight, whether she was playing ditzy Esmeralda or creepy Mrs. Callender.

"I knew I didn't look like an ingenue. My nose was too long. I had crooked teeth. I wasn't blond. I knew I looked like a character actress. But I also knew I'd find a way." ~ Alice Ghostley, 1926-2007
 

jacobsnchz

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"She had roles in... Grease."

Oh, yeah! She played Ms. Murdock, the auto shop teacher!
 

Xerus

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I remember seeing Alice in the classic 60's series, Captain Nice. She played the overprotective mother on the show.

I too liked Alice Ghostley and I won't forget her talents. :cry:
 

Winslow Leach

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I remember watching an episode of Biography on Paul Lynde, and Alice Ghostley was one of the commentators. She was a classmate of Lynde's and they both got their big break in the Broadway musical/comedy sketch revue, New Faces of 1952. Among the other "new faces" were Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence (who played the original Maria in West Side Story), and Ronny Graham, and actor/comic/writer, who later worked with Mel Brooks, and co-wrote Spaceballs.

Anyway, Ghostley said that many people assumed she and Paul Lynde were brother and sister, because they both sort of resembled one another, and both could do devastating impressions of the other's voice. In fact, some thought Alice Ghostley stole Paul Lynde's act when she hit the big time, because her mannerisms were so closely associated with her friend's. They obviously weren't related, but in the docu, Ghostley did a spot-on impression of Lynde.

Ghostley also appeared in the 1957 Rodgers and Hammerstein TV production of Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews in the title role, and Alice as one of the ugly stepsisters.
 
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